Last resort federal flood insurance for more than $46 million worth of property around the Kenai Peninsula Borough could be in jeopardy. Borough assembly members must adopt updated federal floodplain maps by the end of next month, or the feds may cut everyone in the borough off from the federal flood insurance program. But some riverfront property owners say the maps are inaccurate and will lock them into stricter development rules in the decades to come.
Frank Turpin lives near the confluence of the Kenai and Killey rivers. He heads a group of homeowners in that area, called the Kenai Keys, and says a map proposed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, overstates their neighborhood’s flood risk.
“Several years ago, the Killey River cut an entirely new channel to reach the Kenai,” he said. “Aerial photography indicates this was caused by a landslide about 5 air miles from the Kenai. The resulting change deposited an enormous amount of sediment into our floodplain.”
Turpin and other residents say the proposed update didn’t factor in the river’s changing conditions.
So, Turpin and others are asking for their subdivision to be excluded from FEMA’s proposed flood map. He and others successfully lobbied the Kenai Peninsula Borough Assembly on Tuesday to postpone its vote.
But the assembly is up against the clock. The new maps have been in the works for years and if the borough doesn’t adopt them by Feb. 28, everyone in the borough could lose the perks of participating in the federal flood insurance program – not just people along the Kenai River.
FEMA’s National Flood Insurance Program was created by Congress to mitigate potential losses due to flooding. Julie Hindman administers the borough’s floodplain management program, and laid out the stakes for borough planning commissioners last month.
“The borough has been a participating community in FEMA National Flood Insurance Program, or NFIP, since 1986,” she said. “This means the borough regulates FEMA-mapped flood plains, and then the NFIP makes federal disaster insurance, federal hazard mitigation grants, federally subsidized mortgages and flood insurance available in the borough.”
FEMA insures $46 million worth of property around the Kenai Peninsula Borough against floods across 160 active policies. In the almost four decades since the borough joined the program, FEMA’s paid out roughly $604,846.72 to 79 policy holders.
Hindman has taken the lead on presenting the new map to the borough assembly and planning commission. She says the maps don’t create flood risk – they just reflect it.
“We have some people who are actually falling out of that regulatory area and no longer have to comply with those requirements that we currently have,” she said. “But some people – their requirements are getting more strict, and so those people have been very concerned about what that means.”
Public comments show residents are concerned about how the new map will impact their ability to develop land. The map raises the base flood elevation of the river near the Kenai Keys by two feet, putting significant chunks of the subdivision in a floodway. Land in a floodway is subject to more development restrictions than land not in a floodway.
Hindman says the changes wouldn’t be as prohibitive as some fear. New structures on floodway properties would need to be elevated higher than previously allowed. But the borough won’t require residents to elevate their existing structures, unless they are substantially damaged or improved.
Residents say they’ve also run into problems trying to submit feedback on the map throughout the review process. Written public comments describe inaccurate website links and minimal public noticing.
Matthew Fagnani told planning commissioners about one public meeting he attended.
“When we got to that meeting, the decision had already been done,” he said. “The maps were made and it was a take-it-or-leave-it presentation. All of us in that meeting were blindsided.”
The borough and FEMA say property owners were given ample time to voice their concerns during the process. And Hindman says residents engaged in the agency’s formal map appeal process. But she says FEMA won’t change flood boundaries based on anecdotal evidence, and said as such to property owners.
“They were notified that if they had any discrepancies or any issues with the maps that it would have to have some scientific data behind it,” she said. “Because that’s how they were created, was with scientific data.”
Basically, Hindman says residents would need to do their own study that proves landslide sediment is impacting the river the way they say it is. She says the borough doesn’t have the resources to do a new study for that area, and that hiring an independent engineer can cost between $30 and $40,000.
Some, including residents and planning commissioner Jeff Epperheimer, say that’s an unrealistic ask of property owners.
“There’s no way I would ever be able to stand up to the government and afford to do that,” he said. “And that’s what I’m hearing, is nobody could afford to come up with an engineering study to prove that what they were stating was fact.”
Borough assembly members are next scheduled to take up the new map at their Feb. 4 meeting. Kenai Keys residents are asking for the borough to intervene. They suggest the borough ask FEMA for more time to review the new map and keep the old map until sediment from the Killey River landslide has been fully distributed.
